Is the wash-off process of road-deposited sediment source limited or transport limited?

Abstract An in-depth understanding of the road-deposited sediments (RDS) wash-off process is essential to estimation of urban surface runoff pollution load and to designing methods to minimize the adverse impacts on the receiving waters. There are two debatable RDS wash-off views: source limited and transport limited. The RDS build-up and wash-off process was characterized to explore what determines the wash-off process to be source limited or transport limited based on twelve RDS sampling activities on an urban road in Beijing. The results showed that two natural rain events (2.0 mm and 23.2 mm) reduced the total RDS mass by 30%–40%, and that finer particles ( F w ) than the coarser particles, and the F w values provide a good view to characterize the wash-off process. The key conclusions drawn from the combined field and simulated experiments data are: (i) Finer and coarser particle wash-off processes tend to be source limited and transport limited, respectively. (ii) The source and transport limited processes occur during the initial period (the first flush) and later periods, respectively. (iii) The smaller and larger rain events tend to be transport limited and source limited, respectively. Overall, the wash-off process is generally a combination of source and transport limited processes.